When cinema makes you high

Menu

Likeness – Pain from Beauty

Last year Elle Fanning was Mia.

Rodrigo Prieto is a mexicain photographer who worked on several movies such as Biutiful, Babel, 21 Grams and many others. Last year, he finally decided to step up behind the camera and start his first short film; Likeness.

And behind this likeness stands bulimia.

The short opens in a sort of underground club gathering models from Vogue posing and doing some private fashion show under a blue light. The camera infiltrates this world, in which we are intruders, tourists visiting a sort of temple of thinness, where behind each doors lays an offering.Photos are allowed.

Starring Elle Fanning as the main character, only in the credits can we see that her name is Mia; being the nickname given to bulimia.
We followed her into the bathroom, and might think we were her eyes the whole time.
Makeup time, she pulls a mascara out of her purse. Prieto understood that mirrors are probably the worst enemy of an eating disorder victim, after the beauty industry. Then, he drew and constructed his film based on that journey Mia has to go through.

She stoppes, stares at herself and in the blink of an eye sees her face completely distorted, distorted from reality actually, but that she cannot see, she hasn’t step back being caught up in the moment.
Her brain affected by subliminal images of thinness and skinny models, provokes in her an outburst. From the sound of mute screams we know she needs to purge.

The director used cinema as a medium embedded in eating disorders, that is to say, cinema is at the core of the theme; images, light, voyeurism. The eye is the startup of anorexia and bulimia, and a camera is a big eye that everyone can appropriate.

When she goes back, she goes back to a teenage party and not some harem of thinness.
Bulimia gave her the impression to be excluded from a community of skinny girls, when actually she’s the only director of her play. She says she’s okay, we want to scream that she’s not (our mute screams). She might feel a little better, but it’s not going to last long before she falls again into the vicious spiral from which nobody will hear that she needs to be rescued.

The final trump is in Prieto clever use of music, from the hard beginning, until the end when we know that it is not over.